Usually when people talk smack about fun degrees, they mean anything that is not a STEM, Business related, or otherwise vocational like Physical Therapy. Maybe economics is okay.

It is the lazy old stereotype of an English major and a $1.50 gets you a cup of coffee.

These are the people who would reduce universities to being nothing but engineers and are usually very dismissive of scholarship in the arts and humanities.

This is another strawman.

Everyone gives practical advice about going to CC and then a local state school but reality does not work this way.

Kids who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the Northeast liberal arts colleges, are largely doing fine probably. Why? Because people see the name of their alma mater and it is impressive to them, rightly or wrongly. Also those schools have very dedicated alumni networks.

In the long run and possibly even in the short run, a Renaissance studies major from Amherst or Brown is going to have better economic opportunities than the Marketing Major from Southwest North Dakota State.

This is the same as kids from Harvard Law having an easier time in the legal job market than the kids from local and less prestigious law schools.

As mentioned below, I am not advocating for that despite what strawmen you are setting up.

Interestingly I see it differently.

Your idea makes me think of two quotes:

A few years ago, there was an article about Finland in the NY Times. There was a conservative Finnish politician who was quoted as saying something like "Sure anyone can become a billionaire in America but most people won't".

There is also John Steinbeck's line explaining that socialism never took on in America because the poor just see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

My take on the myth of rugged individualism is that it is one of the most pernicious aspects of American culture and one that has truly impeded social welfare and progress from taking hold and always managed to revive a highly reactionary right. Rugged Individualism merely creates Calvinism that damns the poor for being poor. "You don't have health insurance. Why you lazy bum?"

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I reject Calvinism absolutely.

Rugged Individualism is the American Myth and it is just that, a myth. Maybe it existed when we were a largely an agricultural economy of yeoman farmers but I don't think Jefferson's vision held for very long.

There is unfortunately a lot that can be attributed to birth. Studies show that one the best indicators of what class you end up in is what class you were born in. Horatio Alger stories are largely stories.

Oh get off it.

I am not and all liberals are not talking about creating Harrison Bergeuron or getting rid of nepotism or think that there is no such thing as a hierarchy of talent. Yes life is unfair in the fact that there is almost always someone who will be more intelligent, better looking, more charming, more witty, more athletic, more stylish, etc than you.

You can still provide a basic life of dignity and decency via things like single-payer health insurance and other safety net, welfare state aspects while having a capitalist economy. But libertarians would be aghast at that because of silly notions on rugged individualism and a minimal state.

I have seen a lot of articles touch on this point.

The Meritocracy might have made the old-WASP rule more democratic and inclusive but it has largely stopped being a meritocracy. Now we have a possibly more horrible system: Something that has all the worst elements of the old-WASP system (rigged, did you attend the right schools? Do they right activities? etc) but with enough actual work thrown in* that the meritocracy can convince itself that it is all hard work.

This is not to say we should return to the old-WASP system though.

*The day of the Gentlemen C is over. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc still matter but you have to do well.

I disagree with some of your assertions.

I don't know any liberal who would bemoan the success of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, or to go for non-Democratic types: Peter Thiel.

But even they had an incredible amount of luck. None of them were exactly Horatio Alger stories. Everyone likes to use Gates and Jobs as examples of not needing to go to college to be successful. However, this ignores the fact that they were both smart enough to get into very excellent (but radically different) colleges. They also had the luck of being at the right moment and time for the computer industry. My uncle had similar luck on a smaller scale. He was a grad student at Cal in the 1970s but decided that academia was not for him and we wanted to stay in the area. As a smart guy (PhD in psycho-linguistics) he was able to teach himself computer programming and get hired by PacBell. This was before many universities had serious computer science departments so there was less credentialism in the field.

There are also a lot of people who do play by the rules, work hard, and then discover that everything is fucked. I think a lot of the OWS anger and 20-something anger is directed at this aspect of the recession. There are a lot of OWS supporters who are not natural radicals and are not calling for a revival of the Paris commune. Rather they are suburban kids who always worked hard at school and ended up having the poor luck of graduating into one of the worst economic situations since the Great Depression. Possibly one that has been thirty or so years in the making if you look at the stagnate wages of most of the country as compared to the top ten or one percent.

Did these kids make any risks? No. Well possibly taking out a lot of student loans because they were told (and told correctly at the time) that college education is the best way to join the middle class.

It seems to me that the financial services industries have largely caused the current recession and they have not suffered like the rest of us. They still make massive profits and massive pay and no one really gets punished for things like the London Whale or LIBOR scandals.

Yes no one there is no guarantee for any job but a lot of people did work hard and did study hard and now are facing long-term unemployment and/or underemployment. And the reaction to this has been underwhelming and in the case of the Tea Party don't right disgusting. A basic "FU, I've got mine"

Law school is a good example. I graduated in 2011 and am one of the lucky ones because I have a job at good pay that requires bar passage. It is still an independent contractor job though without benefits or vacation. Perhaps this will change or perhaps I am part of a new demographic of people who are basic permanent temp employees.

Excellent post and I agree that this is a strong component of liberal thought.

One can find variants of life as chaos through out human literature and philosophy. From Shakespeare (Hamlet railing against "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune") to the Enlightenment (IIRC there was a concept similar in Montisqieu's The Spirit of Laws) to John Rawls (The Veil of Ignorance) or if we want to get more dark, Beckett.

I would say that a basic concept of center-left government is that no one can control the circumstances of their birth and that the moral role of civil government is to correct this as much as possible. I.e. we should have welfare the insures a basic standard of dignity and decency and institutions that help promote more mobility. The reactionary is of course against this.

All of this does bring up the wicked problems of nepotism and how to solve them or whether they are even solvable.

The art world is a good place to look because there is nothing fair or democratic about the art world. I say this as a former participant. There are a lot of people who can afford to be independently employed in the arts because of being trust fund kids. There is also the cases of Lena Dunham and Zoe Kazan.

Both are from art families. Lena Dunham's parents are famous in the NYC contemporary art scene, Zoe Kazan is the granddaughter and daughter of Hollywood royalty. Both are considered very hot actor-writers. How much did their family backgrounds open doors that would not be open for other young artists? Some or a lot but it is hard to quantify. Do they have people who are detractors who ignore their talents because of their backgrounds? Yes. How about fawning admirers who are too uncritical? Also yes.

The question is how do we solve this problem of nepotism. I think it certainly need solving or some reforms to limit the influence of nepotism but am stumped as to how to say how. This also goes with the abuse of unpaid internships which generally can only go to the wealthy.

Plus the left has the best Marxists

Harpo and Groucho. Chico and Zeppo aren't bad either.

I don't think one needs to be a radical like Alexander Cockburn to speak truth to power or make arguments that need to be made.

I am not arguing for Robspierre and the Citizens Council. Far from it, essentially I am still a capitalist and want to be a member of the upper-middle class. I like Westchester and Marin.

Timothy Noah is a good example of this. Yes he writes and broadcasts on mainstream and well-funded media but he is also willing to acknowledge and make arguments that do somewhat go against the economic preferences of the 1 or near 1 percent. He is right to say that he is more concerned about the bottom 50 or 60 percent instead of the 99 percent. He is not being invited to Aspen or TED to talk about this.

Matt Y creates fantasy worlds that have nothing to do with reality just like David Brooks and Tom Freidman. He is representative of the pundit class developing a kink or one-cure for all the world's ills and milking it into a lucrative career. Matt Y imagines a world of high income global types and then everyone else in creative-ish service jobs like yoga instructor or chef at hip restaurant or maker of nine dollar bottle of jam. He is just as bad as Richard Florida and his creative class myths. Timothy Noah at least acknowledges that wages have been stagnant for a large sector of the American economy and this is bad.

I am guessing that Scandinavia still requires a lot of licensing for professionals like lawyers and even dental hygenists. Matt Y likes to argue against these.

And I would take lighter regulations of business if people on the right would accept a welfare state and the taxes to pay them. Except they just complain about wanting to be John Galt and First Principals and convenient prosperity gospel Calvinism that says it is not the role of government to do this. The Heritage Foundation included.

Dhex,

I meant the second part to go along with the first. Plus I am a firm believer in the Freudian unconscious

Aspen and Ted are very expensive events. A recent New Yorker article on TED stated that it costs thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars to attend the main events. Aspen is probably similarly expensive.

There are some truly interesting TED talks and stuff coming out of Aspen. Usually in non-political areas like art and science. For example, there was a neuroscientist who talked about her own stroke and used a human brain as her guide on stage. This is very interesting and valuable.

However, when it comes to politics especially dealing with economics, these conferences are not so brave and often just pat the audiences on the head for being very rich but very concerned people with liberal(ish) views. So I am kind of cynical about TED Talks and Aspen because they do not really try to rock the boat or upset the attendees when it comes to economic policies and such. The attendees are usually people who have succeeded in the global economy very well while others have suffered. Timothy Noah is not going to be invited to talk about income inequality and explain to the liberal well-to-do about why they need to pay more taxes and wage incomes need to go up.

Hanna Rossin will be invited to talk about "the End of Men" because she completely ignores the socio-economic angle. There might be a crisis in manhood but it is not an even crisis. Hannah Rossin is a well-educated journalist. Her husband is a well-educated journalist. They have two sons and a daughter. I doubt they are concerned about their sons not getting into college. Yet it is not catchy enough to talk about the end of SOME men or the end of "blue-collar men" because of the death of unions, automation, and globalization. So we talk about the End of Men like it is a problem that is free of socio-economics and that there are an equal number of boys from upper-middle class professional families who are not going on to university.

Basically, I think there is a lot of confirmation bias going on at places like Ted and Aspen and Matt Y is part of that confirmation bias. People who go against said bias are not being invited like Timothy Noah.

The right cocktail parties is merely short-hand for saying is concerned about who pays the bills and might pay bigger bills without reaching the truth. He knows what they want to here. For TED criticism:

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/against-ted/

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/21/dont_mention_income_inequality_please_were_entrepreneurs/

http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/14/the-elephants-in-the-room-at-ted/

James K,

Rod hits on very important points.

I am not against expert knowledge and trust experts more than I don't. A glib example would be trusting a doctor about vaccines over Jenny McCarthy and lots of other stuff.

But experts are also human and not always right, so it should not be blind acceptance. I don't consider Matt Y to be an expert on economics and monetary policy like I consider Paul Krugman to be one. Matt Y is to economics as David Brooks is to sociology and Tom Freidman is to foreign policy.

Rod's points on economics are important. It is linked to politics very much. What school are we talking about? Austrian? Chicago? Kaynes? Neo-Kaynes? Etc.

There are economists (or powerful people who misuse economists who think we should abolish the fed, other central banks, and return to the gold standard) I can easily find many just as credentialed economists who support the Fed, stronger regulations, and think returning to the Gold Standard would be a variant of mental illness.

A sincere person could not argue that Milton Freedman, Hayek, Kaynes, and Krugman were not equally credentialed and important. All except Kaynes have won the Nobel prize in Economics. All four have been profoundly influential. All four probably have severe disagreements on economic policy.

Or you are using a very outdated notion of the word liberal which has not existed since the time of Asquith.

Your statement is another reason there will not be a liberal-libertatian alliance.

There is also David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meier, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin.

The American Right-Wing's favorite foreign country is rather socialist.

I think you are constructing a rather convenient strawman for your ideological kinks.

As TheLeft says below, there are plenty of liberals who are not anti-Capitalist but might or might not maintain suspicions about Capitalism in full.

Some other examples that you seem to be forgetting are: F.D.R. (who was certainly not a socialist but created the American Welfare State and believed strongly in standards of living. See the Second Bill of Rights), Hubert Humphrey and the ADA crowd, Clement Atlee, Anuerin Bevan and other old Labor politicians. Social Democrats like Tommy Douglas in Canada (who created their single payer health system), Social Democrats in every Northern European country, etc.

So kindly please respond with reality and not ideological blinders.

I am very suspicious of letting the power of large companies use their leverage to decide these issues. This is not so much competition as it is being bulldozed. And I think we see how big box stores hurt wages in a community. It seems like nothing more but a race to the bottom except in a few urban and their first-ring suburbs across the nation. This is not right. This is not Ghandi's no economy without morality.

Perhaps my view of the world is romantic over rational but I don't believe in the alleged superior rationality of economists. Keep in mind that I am not a full-on Occupy supporter either. My views on them are probably roughly equal to yours. Sympathetic to their goals but critical of their means and what they have become. My financial politics are somewhere to the left of Matt Y neo-liberalism and to the right of AdBusters.

I am not completely against on-line purchasing. I do a decent amount of it. Usually through gilt.com or for things like plane tickets, concert tickets, movie tickets, etc. Sometimes I will pre-order a book on Amazon.com but I also do a lot of real world shopping. I might be strange in that I find shopping enjoyable though. I like being able to browse through stacks or racks and see if anything catches my eye. Chuck this up to an arts-heavy education. There are also a lot of big-ticket items that I would not want to purchase on-line like cars, washing machines, stereos.

I'm still enough of an old-soul to trust the professional critic more than crowd-sourced reviews on sites like yelp and other places. This makes me dreadfully out of date according to the tech-utopians I know.

As to your question, probably both. There are plenty of liberals talking out both side of their mouths but local retail has probably become only really feasible for a yuppie minority. Or people who live in cities. Not necessarily always at a New York or San Francisco level but at a wealthy suburb level (Marin County) or College Town level (Ann Arbor, Amherst or smaller cities like Portland, Seattle, and even Cedar Rapids and Charlotte.

Perhaps that kind of romanticism is a flaw but I think it serves as a necessary counter balance to the tech-utopians who have their own delusions about utopias that will never come. Mainly a post-scarcity world with singularity and/or a fully automated world where no one has to work or work very much. The best tech-utopians I know admit to having a few generations be very unpleasant before these things get sorted out like the Industrial Revolution. Most just act like ostriches.

There are towns and urban neighborhoods that do exist as you described but they are sadly locked in upper-middle class or above neighborhoods. I am not sure if this is completely to the choice of people who do not live in those areas.

As a liberal (not a neo-liberal), Matt Yglesias is not my biggest enemy. The social and neoconservatives are. However, Matt Y does help very much and I find it easy to disagree with him when he talks about the end of retail and other economic issues.

Or rather, I don't want to live in this world. This could be a part of my liberalism that is quite conservative. A part of liberalism that believes in the importance of local communities with local character including retailers and shop-owners who can cater to the needs of the community.

Matt Y does not consider this at all when he writes about economics and society. There is a certain strain of pundit and blogger who finds it very hard to think about things in a non-economic way. There is more to life than basing it around clever economics and business. I am not a full on medium chill person, I consider myself to be economically ambitious but there is more to life than this and policy should be designed around philosophy, ethics, morality, discussion of what kind of communities we want to create. Matt Y seems to find this all to squishy and inconvenient.

Matt Y is the perfect ASPEN/TED talk liberal. Very smart but more concerned about being invited to the right parties and conferences one day. Ones usually filled with very rich people who think their being rich makes them experts in all the problems of the world. They like to hear about ideas but probably not ones that would hurt their established order like hearing Timothy Noah lecture on income inequality or Andy Stein on the need for unions.

Matt Y also has the same problem of many tech-utopians in that he is not realizing that automation is not leading to a world of leisure and post-scarcity. He never bothers to talk about how the business right uses Calvinism to justify automation and not giving a rat's ass for displaced workers.

Can you call Scandinavia neo-liberal? I don't see them as neoliberal by the American standard. Matt Y might praise them but to me Scandinavia is a mixed-market economy with a strong welfare state and lots of regulation.

Matt Y is often about deregulation and not in smart ways. In my opinion he has all the traditional faults of pundits and pure economists: An attraction to arguments and policies that are too clever by half and often contrarian for the sake of contrariness, a failure to understand how the world really works* and/or a strange vision of utopia**, a refusal to engage critics and naysayers, etc, and a belief in deregulation for the sake of deregulation instead of questioning whether some regulations make sense and are better than others. There is a difference between being an unlicensed manicurist and being an unlicensed dental hygienest or lawyer or doctor where the risks of screwing up are much more dire.

Wow that was a screed by Matt Y is my bete-noir.

David brings up good points on the swipe. There has been very little redistribution and neoliberalism just seems like another stooge for big business.

*I have seen way too many lectures by pure/rational economists who seem sincerely gobsmacked at when people fail their rational experiments. The prime example usually being an economist saying "You can have a dollar today or two dollars a year from now". They seem absolutely unable to understand that one and two dollars is so low in terms of purchasing power that it is meaningless to wait for that kind of return even if it is huge percentage wise. Even if you upped the numbers to a more significant one say: 1000 vs. 2000 dollars; there could still be plenty of reasons why a person would take 1000 today like needing to pay their rent or parking tickets so said person can drive to work.

**Matt Y's version of utopia would seem to have most people living in an upper-middle class urban(ish) environment. The population seems divided between white-collar creative professionals and creative(ish) service workers like yoga instructors. He seems not to understand why this is impossible to achieve. He also likes to talk about the end of retail which would take way many of said service jobs.

FWIW, I consider myself a liberal. I just don't think Matt Y helps the cause.

I think the big problem in calling someone like James Holmes evil is largely:

1. It is exactly how we wants to be described.

2. Calling people evil makes them seem impossible to reform and it allows society to avoid tough and painful conversations on mental illness, how to treat the mentally ill, what do you do with the mentally ill who seem to defy treatment while still being a moral and ethical society, etc. And lots of other painful conversations.

3. This piece sums it up well. Basically we want to have our cake and eat it too:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_dilettante/2012/07/aurora_shooting_if_we_want_to_prevent_the_next_massacre_we_need_to_cure_our_addiction_to_evil_.html

Society seems to want to condemn evil while also being attracted to it and revel in it.

Random note:

I have never known anyone who took the ACT. Is that geographically specific?

Everyone in the Northeast seems to just take the SAT and SAT II exams.

I don't know whether Canada has publicly-funded Catholic (or other religious schools) or not. I think in the UK religious schools do receive state-funding.

Religious schools in the United States can and do receive government money but that money cannot be used for religious purposes. They can use it to build a chemistry lab or go on a band trip, they can't use it for religious classes.

Thanks for the numbers, 10 percent might not be a lot but I would want the socio-economic data on those 10 percent. I imagine it contains a lot of people who can make school systems better because of the parents of said kids.

My mom (former public school teacher and administrator) is very against private school before college/university. She finds it somewhat decadent and sinful. Though she is also pragmatic and I was raised in a well-to-do suburb with good public schools. Coincidentally my mom and uncle attended the same school district. We had teachers in high school in common (though 34 years apart. My mom was class of 1964, I was class of 1998).

Interestingly, my mom supports homeschooling as a good alternative for people stuck in bad school districts. I don't think she would support fundies doing homeschooling because they hate what the public school teaches though. She is probably not going to be a fan of unschooling*

*Neither am I. Unschooling is where I think my fellow liberals start getting very silly. I am not hippie or alt enough to support unschooling.

True but I don't think it will resolve anything. Just like the Simpson-Bowles.

Interesting points. Some thoughts:

#3. IIRC from studies and my time in Japan, they have just as many private schools and universities as the U.S. or at least it is just as present. Canada and Finland are different in this regard. I don't think Canada has very few and most of those seem to be religious universities and one Canadian branch of an American university according to wiki.

There are also plenty of things about Japanese education that are not worth carrying over like the crazy cram schools and entrance exams. Japanese universities are not known for their academic rigor. The trick is getting into one of the top 5-7 universities and then you coast for three years. There was another thread in which this site discussed that American universities tend to be more academically rigorous than those found in other countries.

Also Japan is part of a much more streamed system that most Americans, left and right, would balk at. For all our faults, it is easier to have second acts in the American system and late blooming success. This does not seem as true in other countries.

Though I would go for more Finland and Canada in the American system.